Publishing Team Wants to Make a Physical Enyclopedia Out of Wikipedia, is Apparently Serious?

This one comes from The Guardian, which reports that a team from PediaPress (which has worked with Wikipedia on an open source book tool) is trying to raise $50,000 with an Indiegogo campaign that would anthologize the entirety of Wikipedia’s user-generated English-language articles into 1,000 books with approximately 1,200 pages each.

“We all know that Wikipedia is huge,” they wrote. “The English version alone consists of more than four million articles. But can you imagine how large Wikipedia really is? We think that the best way to experience the size of Wikipedia is by transforming it into the physical medium of books.”

This would obviously break a lot of records, and the team at PediaPress envisions the whole thing fitting on a bookshelf roughly 10 yards wide. The Indiegogo campaign is set to expire after 60 days, and thus far, eight days in, the project has raised just $2,000. If they do end up meeting their goal, they plan to send the encyclopedia on an international tour before donating it to a library.

No word yet on whether the volumes will contain classic Wikipedia facts like, “the Teapot Dome Scandal is a DUMB BULLSHIT thing Mr. Connors makes us learn even though IT DOESN’T MATTER AT ALL” or “Tom Brady is a (sic) dooshbag.”